My dissertation will investigate the specific ways that ideologies of modern literature and nation are articulated, contested, and negotiated in the war correspondence of Japan's Meiji period (1868-1912). By analyzing war correspondence from each of the military expeditions of this period alongside contemporaneous fiction and poetry, I will demonstrate that a shared discourse developed between literary authors and dispatched reporters. Furthermore, I will show that this discourse established a dialectic relationship between conceptions and practices of literary and journalistic narration in modern Japan, through which authority and national identity were not only gradually articulated, but also relocated and rendered transparently "natural" in the form of the narrating modern subject.